Red grunted a guttural laugh. “Big Hexed heroine, huh? Saving the day?”
I ignored her and raised my voice. “Who else is in here? Speak up.” The container only had the single bulb, and my eyes were so dry that my vision probably wasn’t any better than a plain human’s. That was a depressing thought. “Tell me you’re all right,” I said softly. “Please.”
“Me,” someone whispered from the darkest corner of the container. “I’m here.”
“What’s your name?” I said, squinting into the dimness. A petite girl with a long fall of brown hair pulled her knees up to her chest, hugging herself.
“Anna.”
“Anna, I’m Luna. Are you a witch or a were?”
“A caster witch,” she whispered. “He invited me to happy hour after my nursing class let out and I woke up here.” Her numb recitation spoke to shock, and I scooted over to her, trying to keep myself out of the filth on the floor of the container. It was mostly vomit—I wasn’t the only one who’d lost their cookies upon waking up in this small square of hell, apparently.
“It’s not your fault,” I said. “We’re going to find a way out of here.”
“Yeah,” Red snorted. “When they sell us into sexual slavery.”
“Will you shut the Hex up?” I snarled. “You’re really not helping morale here.”
“It’s okay,” Anna whispered. “I know I’m not getting out of here. They took my caster. I can’t pull down energy, either.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “Anyone else?”
“My head hurts,” said a fourth voice. “Do you mind keeping it down?”
I looked further into the shadows, seeing the hunched figure only in profile. “Sorry. I think we’re all a little out of sorts.”
“Yes, well.” She sighed. “I couldn’t care less about making friends, so could we please just wait to find out what they want from us and how much it will cost to get me out of this metal box of idiots?”
“What’s your name?” I said, ignoring the lumping in with the other idiots. “We all know each other now, so it’s only fair.”
“Charlie,” she said. “Now please leave me alone.”
“You don’t seem real upset,” Red said. “Maybe this is everyday for you, but for the rest of us, well … % We’re locked in a fucking box! ” She beat her fists against the side again.
Charlie sighed. “Go right ahead, if it makes you feel better. Like the reporter said, we’re bound in here. That door could be wide open and we couldn’t walk out. The working would put us on our backs.”
“Are we going to die?” Anna asked.
“No,” I said, at the same time that Red said “Maybe.” I shot her a look. “We don’t know,” I said. “I have a feeling we’re worth more alive.”
“I am,” Charlie said. “But the rest of you…”
“You’re kind of a bitch, aren’t you?” Red growled. Charlie flashed some fang in return. I didn’t protest—Red hadn’t said anything I wasn’t thinking.
People deal with trauma in different ways, I reminded myself. Most lose their heads, some get angry, and some, like Charlie, go cold. “Listen,” I said loudly. “Is anyone hurt? Anyone who can’t walk or needs meds right away?”
“I cut myself when I woke up,” Charlie said. “I was trying to get out and I sliced my hand on the binding. It might already be infected.”
“All right,” I said, ignoring the whine in her tone that was clearly hunting for our undivided attention. “Anna, can you take a look at her? You’re a nurse, right?”
“Student nurse,” she murmured. “I’m not certified yet.”
“Well, it beats my two weeks of EMS training,” I said with a smile. “Just make sure that she’s not going to bleed to death or go septic, all right? Can you do that for me?”
“Okay.” She nodded, crawling over to Charlie. I looked at Deedee.
“You okay?”
“I’m doing better,” she said tightly. “Still can’t breathe. I don’t like small spaces.”
I started to tell her that everything would be fine, even though I had nothing to back it up. I figured the least I could do was to try and stay calm, but before I could say anything there was a rumbling outside and the doors of the crate started to swing open.
Red rocketed out of her crouch. “Holy shit. They’re here.”
Deedee let out a small cry and Anna flinched against Charlie, who rolled her eyes. “It’s not the Gestapo out there. Jesus.”
“You don’t know that,” I said shortly. “Everyone stay still and do what they say. You live longer by cooperating with kidnappers.”
“You’re bossy,” said Charlie. “I bet you were a hall monitor, weren’t you? Before you went to community college and got a job that lets you push people smarter than you around?”
“Hey, puta, shut your mouth,” said Red. “I don’t see you trying to help us out of this.”
I shot Red a grateful look. Charlie was getting on my last nerve with remarkable speed.
“You little…” Charlie started, but I raised my hands.
“Enough. Both of you be quiet.” The doors swung back with a groan and a bright beam of spotlight sliced into my eyes. Red and Charlie let out a groan.
“Nobody move,” said a heavily accented voice. “We are in charge.” I made out two shadows behind the light, one of whom was holding a rifle, trained on us.
“He’s got a gun,” I said. “Take it easy.”
“Shut up!” the same voice shouted at me. “Get up, all of you!”
We all managed to get to our feet, Charlie tottering on a single shoe. Anna tried to shrink into herself even more while Red snarled.
“These are the rules that will enable you to live to see the light of day again,” the voice said. “One: You will not try to escape. You will not make noise and you will not cry. You will be fed once a day. You will be clean. If you are sick or filthy, no one is going to help you.”
There was a creak, and the light fell a bit, giving me a look at the men’s faces. They were white, tattooed, ugly to a man. They had that nothing-behind-the-eyes chill of career criminals, and I knew that if one of us stepped out of line she’d be dead as quickly as the gun-toter could depress the trigger of his Kalashnikov.
“You will hold still and be cleaned. If you scream, we will punish you.” The raspy-voiced leader of the pack sure had a thing for punishment.
“Come over here and say that, you pasty-faced waste of sperm!” Red snarled.
There was no response, except a humming rush and then a blast of frigid water slammed into us from the ship’s fire hose. Anna and Charlie screamed, Deedee threw up her hands to cover her face and I grabbed one of the struts in the container to stay on my feet. Magick crawled over my hand from the binding, and I yanked it away.
The water was so cold that my skin lost feeling almost immediately, and the hose coursed over each of us in turn, washing the filth out of the container and beating us down until all I could hear was the roar of the water.
“You’re warned,” said the leader. “Any back talk, any resistance, and you’ll get worse.” A plastic five-gallon bucket landed at my feet. “Use that from now on, you filthy whores.”
“Hey!” Red shouted as they started to shut the door. “Hey, what about our clothes? We’re freezing!”
The clang echoed, rattling my teeth. I started to shiver uncontrollably, my pants and blouse doing nothing to keep the cold from me. I might as well have been soaking wet and naked.
Focus, Luna. Think. There were two minders, for three weres and two witches. They knew we had nowhere to go, even if we broke the binding and overpowered them. We were in the middle of the ocean on a cargo liner, with no way to call for help. They counted on us to be passive, terrified, womanly. And we had no choice but to be exactly that, or take a bullet in the head.
I slid back down the wall, water pooling around my feet. My shaking became less from the cold and more from panic. I turned my face toward the
wall, trying to hide my meltdown from the other women. I might need them later, and they needed to see me as unflappable, a leader, if we were going to live.
Anna was still crying softly, and Charlie heaved a sigh, moving away from her. “Look, someone is bound to be looking for me. I’m a very important person back in Nocturne City, a lawyer. Not like the rest of you. They’ll find me.”
“Bitch, are you out of your head?” Esperanza snapped. “She’s a cop and they’re sure as shit not breaking down the door to rescue her.”
“They’re not going to be able to find any of us,” said Deedee. “My editor wouldn’t even know I was gone until I didn’t come to work on Monday.”
“No one’s looking for me,” Red said softly. “No one in the pack cares about one bitch.”
They kept talking, and all I thought was that I had to stay focused, had to not panic, had to keep myself until control.
Because no one was coming for me, and no one would help. I couldn’t count on a rescue or a brilliant plan.
I was alone.
CHAPTER 13
A week went by, if I counted by how many times the men came and fed us expired MREs with Cyrillic lettering on the labels. The bucket got emptied, but only if we were lucky. Esperanza cursed and screamed at the men every time they came—their names were Mikel and Peter. Mikel was the one who held his gun like a girlfriend. Esperanza got hosed down each time, but it didn’t seem to do much for her temper.
I was starting to like Red. The rest of the girls drifted in and out, Charlie periodically monologuing about her fabulous life as an attorney, Deedee telling me about her grandmother, Anna crying more often than not. She was always quiet about it, but her eyes had started to get that hunted, all-whites animal look. Much longer and she was going to lose it.
Drifting gave me plenty of time to think, but not much that went through my head made sense. This wasn’t just sex trafficking—if it was, there wouldn’t be only witches and weres in the container with me. They wouldn’t be kidnapping us from the United States and sending us overseas. Quite the opposite.
Mostly, I thought about everyone that I’d left back in Nocturne. Will, Sunny, the SCS. Will would think that I’d freaked out and ditched him, at least for the first few days. Sunny would lose her mind with worry. My detectives would know exactly how stupid and hardheaded I’d been, and how wrong it had gone, and I’d lose whatever respect I’d managed to build.
I was starting to get weak, a low-grade fever raging through my system. No one except Esperanza was still fighting. We existed in the box, in the small metal world that was our prison. Charlie’s hand was infected, Anna had stopped talking and Deedee was so dehydrated she couldn’t do much more than lie on her side.
“We’re not making it out of here, are we?” Red said, sitting down next to me.
“It’s not if, it’s what condition we’re in when we do,” I muttered. “What percentage of us dead is an acceptable profit/loss margin?”
“There’s a happy thought,” she said. “You must’ve been a regular cheerleader back home, huh, Luna?”
“How the hell are you still so peppy?” I demanded, wiping sweat off my face. I felt like someone was banging a drumstick slowly against my brain, in time with my heart. I knew that the repeated soakings, the lousy food and the appalling sanitary conditions had given me the flu, if not something worse. The were couldn’t heal me if it kept getting exposed to more trauma.
“Benefit of the Diablos,” said Red. “Fast healing. And I do mean fast.”
“We’re all so happy for you,” Charlie muttered.
“You should rest,” said Red. “Rest is the best thing for a cold, my mother always said.”
“Before or after she kicked your slutty ass out of the house?” Charlie said.
“You know what?” Deedee said. “There’s no call for you to be so mean. We’re all here, and we should be sticking together.”
“Pollyanna, you and I are nothing alike,” said Charlie. “Excuse me if I don’t want to be lumped with you sad sacks while all hope of a rescue slips away from me. I am not being the sex slave of some sweaty Soviet farmer, all right? That’s for you saps to hold hands and cry over.”
“Ignore her,” Red said, stroking the sweaty hair back from my forehead. “Try to sleep.”
My survival instinct said that I shouldn’t, that I needed to be awake and alert, lean and hungry in case of attack. Hypervigilance, the books I’d read during training called it, the symptom of posttraumatic stress that put the grinning imp of fear on your back, made you keep that back to the door at all times, never sleep, see enemies everywhere …
I was so tired, though, that I felt my eyelids flutter even as I remembered sitting in the dusty classroom at the Las Rojas Police Academy, listening to Dr. Corchran drone on about trauma and abuse and lingering symptoms of both.
Sleep came fleet and dark, but it didn’t last long. I woke up to see Lily Dubois looking down at me, her hair clinging to her blue-white skin, spots of lividity on the side of her neck.
“You better not forget about me,” she snarled, her hand reaching for me. The pads of her fingers were white and wrinkled, shriveled around her small birdlike bones.
The hand closed around my throat, and it was the cold of deep water. “You better not let me be forgotten.”
I gasped myself awake, sitting up and banging my head on the side of the container. Deedee touched me on the shoulder and I flinched. “What’s wrong, Luna?”
“Bad dreams,” I said, though if I hadn’t known with my own eyes Lily was dead I never would have called it a dream.
“This whole place is a bad dream,” Deedee sighed. “I thought I was getting the story of a lifetime, and look where I am.”
“I thought I closing my case,” I said. “I thought I was doing the right thing…”
“I can tell you from experience that the right thing isn’t always the obvious thing,” said Deedee. “Or even the thing that seems right, on the face.”
“Fucking profound,” said Charlie. I vowed that if we ever got out of this, she was due for a slap.
“Listen,” Anna whispered. “Listen. ”
Charlie and I cocked our heads, as did Red, three pairs of were ears tuned to noises outside the crate. There was shouting in Ukrainian above us, and footsteps.
“Notice anything?” Esperanza said. I put my hands on the side of the container, trying to ignore the crawl of magick. I can Path it, absorb it and use it, but this working wasn’t anything I wanted in me.
“The engines,” I said after a moment. “The engines stopped.”
“We’re saved,” Deedee said. “Someone must have stopped them.”
For a while, the hope that spread among the other women was almost infectious, and I allowed that some kindfaced Interpol agent might open the door and put a blanket around my shoulders and help me get in touch with Will and file charges against Rostov and Salazko and all the rest.
As the time stretched out, I knew that we weren’t rescued. “What’s taking them so fucking long?” Red snapped.
“We’re not saved,” I sighed. “They’ve gotten to where we’re going.”
A cargo crane carried us, swaying and bouncing, to rest on a dock somewhere. Light flickered from the seams of the crate, and then male voices approached, along with the rumble of an engine.
The door swung open and the spotlight hit us again. Mikel shouted, “Stand up, whores!” He tossed in a bundle of plastic handcuffs. “Put them on each other and step out! Keep your eyes down. No talking!”
Charlie grabbed up the bundle. “Come here, Nurse Anna.” She whipped the cuffs around Anna’s skeletal wrists with surprising efficiency.
Anna flinched, dipping her head so her hair fell in front of her face. Charlie rolled her eyes. “I don’t want to get sprayed again. Cowgirl up.”
“You are so fucking compassionate I may cry,” I said.
“No talking!” Mikel barked again.
“You know some
thing?” I said, my fever and my general state making me reckless. “You’re a nasty little man and you’re going to get exactly what you deserve when I get out of here.”
“I’ll look forward to getting you alone, then, beautiful,” he said, licking his lips. He grabbed me and shoved me into Esperanza, who in turn stumbled out of the crate, hissing as the light hit her eyes for the first time in a week.
A tumbledown truck was waiting for us, and once we’d been shoved in the back and the door rolled shut, we moved again, bouncing over rough ground.
“Just like home,” I muttered. “It feels so good to be back.”
We drove for hours, or even days—my sense of time was so Hexed that I could have been in there for a year. When we stopped for the last time, it was in a bleak warehouse. Peter hauled us out of the truck while Mikel held his trusty Kalashnikov on us. We frog-marched across the warehouse and into a warren of cinder-block corridors that exuded the same dampness as an old tomb.
There were cells, metal doors half-rusted, mesh with no glass attached, faint spray letters the only hint to what the warehouse had been before the gangsters took it over. There were girls in the cells, dozens of them, dirty, matted hair and skinny to a woman.
Mikel prodded us into the farthest cell, and slammed the door, locking a padlock that was the newest thing in the warehouse. The three men retreated, the lights went out, and we were alone in the dark again.
The next morning—I could tell it was morning because of the convenient hole in the ceiling that let in a fall of rain during the night and weak sunlight now—Mikel and Peter reappeared. There was a third figure behind them, and Peter stood aside deferentially.
I nudged Deedee. “That’s got to be a boss.”
“Fantastic,” she muttered. “Can’t wait to meet him.”
Charlie stood up. “Excuse me. I don’t belong here with them. You want money? I’ve got money. I could probably buy this whole godforsaken country with what I make in a year. Just tell me how much and let me out of here so I can call in a wire transfer. As much as you want. American dollars. Simple, right?”
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